Examination of Witnesses (Questions 120-139)
PROFESSOR JOHN
FARRINGTON AND
DR CAROLINE
DYER
15 SEPTEMBER 2004
Q120 Chairman: This is one view, Professor
Farrington. Do you think that DFID has made sufficient impact
on issues of land tenancy and extension schemes that would enable
poor farmers to get higher returns from their land and labour?
Or is your concern that DFID really is not engaged sufficiently
in agriculture at all?
Professor Farrington: I do not
think it is sufficiently engaged. I do not think it is sufficiently
informed about what the possibilities are in agriculture. That
is my basic position. There have been successful examples of agriculture
extension within rural livelihood schemes, within those fairly
narrow geographical boundaries, but very little of that has been
scaled up and taken to government and inserted in the way government
does agriculture extension, so that opportunity has been lost.
On land, land is a very interesting one because land reform, in
the sense of land redistribution, was on the agenda in India very
shortly after independence and ran for 20 or 30 years, 40 years
in some states, with a very, very mixed record. In some states
it was quite successful, in other states large land-holders found
all kinds of ways of evading the provisions of the Land Ceilings
Acts. I think there are dimensions of land which do not involve
redistribution which are potentially very interesting and are
more feasible in the current political climate, and one of them
has to do with reform of land tenancy and leasing. There are some
fairly draconian provisions in the laws of a lot of states which
have a kind of `land to the tiller' philosophy behind them. In
other words, if you have been a tenant for three years on a piece
of land you ought to have the option to buy that land, in fact,
it might even be compulsorily purchased and handed over to you.
These provisions were set up with the best will in the world at
a time when independence took place and they wanted to move away
from the exploitative practices of middle-men in the old days.
I think there are really important questions about whether their
usefulness has now been outlived and whether they are putting
a brake on land renting and tenancy, because landlords are afraid
that if a tenant stays there for a couple of years then they will
not get their land back. I have been told that in Kerala there
are something like 80,000 hectares of rice-land standing idle
because the landlords cannot cultivate them, for whatever reason,
but are afraid to rent them out in case they do not get them back.
One needs to look at those kinds of provisions in relation to
land. The other factor with land I think is a very interesting
one. There is a lot of migration out of agricultural areas into
urban areas on a seasonal basis and people have looked at this
as a distress phenomenon. It is not necessarily distress, it is
a very positive livelihood opportunity for a lot of people who
could survive in agriculture but can survive better if they have
that extra bit of cash from construction, or whatever, in the
towns. In some circumstances they are actually very reluctant
to move away from their plot of land, unless they can get a bit
of money for it and rent it out in the meantime. They may leave
their wife behind who can manage only, say, half their plot; what
do they do with the other half, can they rent it out? If they
can, they might be much more inclined to diversify into other
activities, which is very positive. If they cannot, they might
sit at home. I think those kinds of conditions are potentially
interesting and important.
Dr Dyer: Can I make a point about
how livelihoods and education might intersect at that particular
point in relation to migrant labourers, who are often migrating
in very well-known and predictable seasonal cycles, particularly
out of tribal areas in Gujarat, which I know best. One can say
immediately that the children will be able to attend schools for
about three or four weeks at the beginning of the school year,
subsequent to that they might go to the sugar cane or building
industries, where there is no education provision for them at
all. Then they return and it is very difficult for them to get
reabsorbed into the school system when they return home the next
year. This is a phenomenon that seems not to be getting any kind
of attention at all, from DFID or otherwise.
Q121 John Barrett: DFID in Andhra Pradesh
have come in for some stick for their support for the government's
Vision 2020, and you mentioned urbanisation and the move away
from land on a seasonal basis. How do you assess DFID's support
for Vision 2020 and is your assessment that they are looking towards
more of an organisation society rather than supporting the agricultural
dimension?
Professor Farrington: I think,
with or without Vision 2020, the long-term trend is towards urbanisation.
The absolute numbers of rural people in states like Andhra Pradesh
is going to peak in about 20 or 30 years' time, the demographics
are quite well known, so urbanisation is there. One facet of Vision
2020 was to move towards highly commercialised farming for export
on a contract-farming basis and to give corporate access to fairly
large pieces of land. This has attracted a huge amount of media
attention because some have argued that it implies dispossessing
people who already occupy that land and perhaps forcibly it is
causing them to move into urban areas, or whatever. I am not sufficiently
well informed to form a judgment but one can see that is a danger.
As far as I am aware, DFID's support has not been for elements
of Vision 2020 of that kind, it has been for rather different
things. The Vision 2020, I suspect, is now part of history. I
very much doubt whether the new Government of Andhra Pradesh would
want even to hear mention of Vision 2020, so I think it is a closed
chapter.
Q122 Mr Battle: I would like to ask about
hunger and famine because I think generally it is said, and Amartya
Sen suggested, that the one thing India achieved in the 20th century
was eliminating famine, and yet is it not the case that in some
states there is still hunger? Again, it is just a question of
are DFID's strategies working with the livelihoods approach to
make sure that agriculture is a sustainable food strategy?
Professor Farrington: There are
something like 240 million undernourished people in India,
about 20% of the population. It is very high. It is concentrated
in particular geographical areas, mainly in the semi-arid rain-fed
areas of central India, and it is concentrated socially among
the scheduled tribes and the lower castes. I think that is part
of where the difficulty lies, the way in which the caste system
is structured is hugely problematic I think in terms of trying
to improve the conditions of lower-caste people. They face all
kinds of structural problems in accessing resources, productive
resources, in accessing opportunity and accessing markets. It
has been like that for a very long time and DFID within five years
is not going to change that.
Q123 Mr Battle: Is it going to make much
impact on it at all?
Professor Farrington: It might
do. If you look at these rural livelihood schemes and projects,
the ones in Orissa, for example, they have a very high tribal
and scheduled caste concentration within those areas, and certainly
within that geographical frame something can be done.
Q124 Mr Battle: DFID are targeting those
areas, are they?
Professor Farrington: Within rural
livelihood projects, they are targeting those, yes, which is very
positive, because that is a tiny fraction of the total tribal
population and scheduled castes population of the whole country.
Q125 Chairman: Can I go on to education?
I think in 2003-04 DFID spent nearly £42 million on education
in India, and in 2004-05, quite a drop, is spending £12½
million. Drawing on your experience in the education sector, how
do you evaluate the contribution of DFID programming to India's
progress on education?
Dr Dyer: It is really quite difficult
to distinguish the DFID contribution from that of the other donors,
because it has been such an exemplary example really of how donor
co-operation worked in the biggest programme under the DPEP. I
am finding it quite difficult to respond to that global kind of
question.
Q126 Chairman: Let me put the question
another way. Whatever the figure is, it is a substantial amount
of money. Question: can it actually make any impact? Does it make
any impact in its own terms, is that worthwhile, does it have
any leverage? Is that the best way for DFID to be spending its
money?
Dr Dyer: It does have impact because
it augments very, very slim educational budgets and it is important
to do that, but there is still a long way to go on the quality
of education. The quality of policy dialogue that DFID can have
also makes a difference. DFID can introduce new ideas, promote
sharing of ideas, where this is happening, so I think it does
have an impact. I am not sure that DFID is able to get down and
see enough of the real grass roots of the educational institutions
and what they really do and what the capacities are to come up
with ways forward which really, really make a difference. I am
thinking in particular of teacher education processes, of recruiting
the teacher educators, who they are, what they do, what capacities
are really required of them to make a difference. I think we do
not have enough information, not only DFID but perhaps the Government
of India also, about the actual educational processes to allow
DFID to be more proactive in really addressing some of the key
issues in the quality of education.
Q127 Chairman: Who is responsible for
promulgating best practice in education in India?
Dr Dyer: There is a very serious
problem in Indian education in relation to research and the research
that is done. A huge project like the DPEP, for example, has thrown
up very, very little in the way of good quality evaluative studies
of processes and lessons learned. It is very difficult to access
information about what has been good practice and therefore to
share it. There was an almost anti-research response from the
Government of India during quite a lot of the DPEP so the Government
of India did not take that responsibility perhaps as seriously
as one might have hoped and expected. A lot of reports are not
in the public domain and they are very difficult for people to
access. In terms of responsibilities, I think the Government of
India did not take that up particularly. I am not sure that the
donors took that up as much as they might have done and as a result
we have had one of the largest educational programmes and we do
not know enough about it, we do not even know really what the
final achievements of the children in the DPEP Phase One states
were.
Q128 Chairman: Why do you think that
is? Do you think that is because the Government of India is concerned
that any objective independent assessment will demonstrate it
has not been as successful as politically they would like to suggest,
or they just do not have the machinery to do it?
Dr Dyer: I think there are political
issues about whether it is successful because the quality of public
education is well known to be a very major issue. The quality
of the machinery to do it, certainly there was a lot of slippage
in the initial surveys and mid-term surveys by the national organisation
that was charged with doing it, so that the assessment figures
we do have, unfortunately, do not have very much credibility.
There is an issue of technical capacity nationally also to do
that. Partly that might be about the Government of India's political
relationships with the national-level organisations and that perhaps
it has not felt able to commission other and perhaps more able
institutions to undertake those national-level surveys.
Q129 John Barrett: It sounds as if it
is a very difficult problem to get a grasp of—is DFID's
money being well spent? Is it effective in one area?—and
the sums are quite big. DFID's intention is to spend £210
million through the universal basic education scheme and it sounds
as though we have not really got a grasp of what work has to be
done. You mentioned poor research but are we doing the right thing?
Do you think DFID's contribution to the universal elementary education
programme is focusing on the right problem?
Dr Dyer: I do not think there
can be any doubt about that at all. I know we might not have enough
evidence but we do know that there are major issues of quality
and it is absolutely right, it is a constitutional commitment
and there are many, many children who are not getting into schools
still, despite the improvements. There are large numbers of children
who are not being retained through the first primary cycles: 50%
of children are dropping out of school within the first five years,
and 50% of those drop out after only one year. I do not think
that really there can be any doubt that DFID does need to get
involved and should get involved. I am not entirely clear from
the documentation that has been provided as to the nature of DFID's
contribution to the centrally-sponsored scheme of Sarva Shiksa
Abhiyan, whether that funding is an additionality, whether DFID's
money will be going into the central pot, whether it is just going
into the pot or it is going to be allocated to specific elements.
It would be useful to have more detail on that in order that one
could monitor and assess the impact of DFID's spend under Sarva
Shiksa Abhiyan. I am not clear from the documentation.
Q130 Mr Davies: Given that, as Professor
Farrington was just saying, the problem of poverty in India is
concentrated among the scheduled castes and tribes, which used
to be known as untouchables, and so forth, has DFID focused sufficiently
on those scheduled castes and tribes, has it given sufficient
priority to that in its programmes?
Professor Farrington: It is certainly
aware of the issues, and certainly in the rural development projects,
the ones we have been discussing, they are there. There are two
kinds of difficulty here. One is that, if one works through government
schemes and programmes, nominally a lot of what government does,
whether it is at central government level or state government
level, is geared towards poverty reduction among these particular
groups, and a lot of their legislation and their provisions have
very, very affirmative action in terms of these groups. The difficulty
is that there is a huge gap between the rhetoric of these and
the reality on the ground, the practice on the ground. It is very,
very hard to get some of this implemented and I am fearful that
by working through government mechanisms one simply is not going
to meet it. That is one problem. The other problem I think is
that the Government of India does not have a good record of dealing
with tribal people, in terms of trying to understand what their
livelihood objectives are. It tends to assume that they want the
same kind of western consumerist things as everybody else might
want and uses that assumption as a basis for simply trying to
amalgamate them into the mainstream of development, and I think
that has caused a lot of concern. I would like to be reassured
that DFID takes a more nuanced view of what tribal peoples' livelihood
objectives are than the Government of India has done so far. Of
course, the other side of the coin is that if DFID goes in with
the Government of India in dealing with tribal people then there
is a danger that it might pick up the same set of assumptions.
It would need, I think, to challenge the assumptions.
Q131 Mr Davies: This is again a criticism,
a very reasonable one it sounds to me, of DFID's approach to reducing
poverty in India through budgetary support. Basically what they
are doing is piggy-backing here on government programmes which
you say are ill-conceived, inadequate, badly targeted, so far
as the scheduled tribes and castes are concerned, and so those
inefficiencies inevitably affect the DFID programme as well. Is
there a governance issue here? Would one solution be to try to
draw the beneficiaries more into the management and governance
of the programmes, which maybe the Government of India or the
local state governments would not want to do but maybe if DFID
was running its own independent projects it could do more easily?
Professor Farrington: Yes. Let
me just clarify one thing, for a moment. I think the problem of
design has to do more with tribal issues. I think the quality
of the design of a lot of schemes that deal with poverty, including
the CSS (Centrally Sponsored Schemes) is actually very good. The
problem is with the quality of implementation of those designs.
The Indian Administrative Service is second to none, in terms
of its capacity to design schemes, they are super.
Q132 Mr Davies: If they are piggy-backing
on the delivery there must be something wrong with that line of
delivery, if there are shortcomings there then naturally they
affect the delivery of the DFID programme too. Can I come back
to this governance issue, because the picture you describe is
one of a top-down attempt at policy alleviation and you say that
is not always very effective, it is not always well delivered?
If you were to introduce a greater degree of bottom-up, or at
least involve the bottom in the design and delivery of the programmes,
would that be a way forward? It is not something perhaps that
the Indian Administrative Service would appreciate but if DFID
were running some of their programmes rather more independently
might it be possible for them to do that, do you think?
Professor Farrington: I think
it is a way forward and I think the Government of India and some
of the state governments have captured it, in the context of the
strengthening of local government that was mentioned a short time
ago, the decentralisation programme under the Constitutional Amendments.
There is reservation of seats within local government for scheduled
castes and scheduled tribes and women, and so on, there are set
proportions of representation there of seats that have to be filled
by those categories, so they do have some prospect, I think, of
influencing the local adaptation of some of these schemes and
the local implementation of some of them.
Q133 Mr Davies: Your message is, it might
be a useful day's work to put some money aside for supporting
schemes, the planning and delivery of which would be done in conjunction
with these local entities which, by definition, as you say, have
a large degree of representation of scheduled tribes and scheduled
castes in them. This will give ownership of the programmes rather
more to the actual beneficiaries?
Professor Farrington: That is
absolutely right. The problem is that the extent to which scheduled
castes and tribes are able to articulate their views and get them
pushed through varies enormously from one context to another.
In certain contexts where there are reasonably harmonious relations
it may well work. In other contexts there is a capture by local
elites of almost all aspects of the development agenda, and tribals,
they are not able to assert themselves, they are not able to assert
their views, even through constitutionally-determined bodies,
against those elites.
Q134 Mr Davies: The DFID approach, of
course, is actually to accept that their programmes are captured
from day one, because by definition they are captured, they are
simply giving the money to state governments, so they are captured,
by definition, by the existing political elite, who are the people
who are running the local state government. What we are talking
about now is something which would bypass that and would involve
setting up structures, maybe ad hoc, in some cases, involving
the beneficiaries. This is an approach which would be very revolutionary,
in terms of what DFID are doing in India currently, would it not?
Professor Farrington: Yes. The
proposed West Bengal programme has a very large component of strengthening
local administrations, strengthening local government, to deliver
development benefits, and I think that is all positive.
Dr Dyer: One of the big problems
for the education system is that it is most successful at alienating
people because it does not respond to their aspirations, it has
issues with the curriculum, which does not deliver for them, and
it would be very interesting to see some real grass roots work
on working with people to see what their aspirations for education
actually are.
Q135 Mr Davies: Can you characterise
just briefly what are typically the aspirations of untouchables,
or scheduled castes or tribes, in the educational field, on the
one side, and the values which are targeted by the state government
educational programmes, on the other, because you say they are
not the same?
Dr Dyer: It would be very difficult
to do that very effectively, I think. If you look at the illustrations
and textbooks, they are very urban, they are about cleanliness
and health and hygiene. It is not that scheduled castes and scheduled
tribes do not have ways of doing this or that they do not have
their own norms, it is just that they are not reflected in the
textbooks. It is a different way of going about the representation
of things.
Q136 Mr Davies: What do you do about
that?
Dr Dyer: Interesting experiments
have been done in Gujarat, for example, in devolving textbook
design to incorporate consultations with people about what they
want to have in their textbooks. Parents have views. It can be
done, it is difficult to do but it can be done; maybe making time
to go and ask people and to get a voice from the people.
Q137 Mr Battle: In my experience, most
if not all governments tend to be top-down, and tapping in to
build a base-up approach is very, very difficult but needs to
be done. Usually it does not come from government initiatives,
either locally or centrally, but comes from the groups themselves,
who start to resist the top-down and build up ideas and new ways
of doing things and then ask perhaps for support as pilot or demonstrator
models and schemes. I wonder whether there are any examples that
you can think of—and the Professor gave us earlier some
sharp examples of insurance—for example, good examples of
alternative bits of resistance to the top-down system that DFID
ought to be getting behind? They can do it, because, for example,
in Ethiopia, they have been very, very imaginative in supporting
the initiative of the pastoralists there. I do not know India
well but it is a group that is really looked down on by everybody
and cut out of the whole economic system and it would be inappropriate
to apply urban norms, urban redevelopment norms, to pastoralists,
for example. There is some scope for them to move into that area.
Is there in India?
Dr Dyer: I am sure there is, in
India. In terms of the pastoralists, one of the problems is that
a lot of them actually are not recognised, they are not recognised
constitutionally as scheduled castes or scheduled tribes, so they
do not have any rights to things. Although they might be making
their demands—it depends from pastoralist group to pastoralist
group—on the state, the state then is able to say, "Well,
you're not special. You might be poor but you're not entitled
to reservations, although palpably you might need them, because
you don't belong in one of our boxes."
Q138 Mr Battle: Usually NGOs can break
through with a bit of imagination, both locally and nationally,
and come up with some ideas. Have you any experience there of
good examples of good practice that could be built on to turn
the system upside-down?
Dr Dyer: Just while we are on
the subject of pastoralists and migration, I think India really
has not got a policy response, so in terms of good practice then
practically nothing comes to mind to point to, unfortunately.
It is very difficult for poor and disenfranchised people, particularly
people who have dropped out of schools, who have poor educational
experiences themselves and are not literate, and are perhaps a
scheduled caste as well, to get the authorities to listen when
they go and complain, if they dare to go and complain, that a
teacher simply has not turned up to the school for ten days. It
is very, very difficult to know what to do and where to go and
do that and make it happen. It is a very forbidding and not very
accessible, bureaucratic system.
Q139 Chairman: Dr Dyer, you have expressed
some concerns that maybe the DFID country office in India is maybe
not always as tuned-in as it might be to research commissioned
by DFID in London when it is developing policy. I wonder if you
can give us some particulars of that kind of slight dysfunction?
Dr Dyer: It may well be that this
is being addressed by the reorganisation of the DFID Research
Division, but there has been a sense in the past that research
commissioned out of London has not had perhaps the buy-in from
DFID in India, and particularly if that has been longer-term research,
that there is a turnover of advisers in DFID India who perhaps
do not live necessarily with the duration of the project. I think
there are issues about DFID's current extreme focus, in my view,
on policy-orientated research. There is also still a very strong
need for research that does not come up with policy pointers but
looks really at processes and implementation of things.
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